The Best Free Games of the Week

Stitch a riven world back together, assassinate jerking insects as Agent Frog 47, explore space prose and do two other mysterious things this week. If you've settled yourself down into your free games papoose—you could also use a chair, I suppose—we can begin.

Stitcher by Christoph Schnerr and Jule Baetz

The text/translation could use a good going over in this inventive, detailed indie puzzler, but I just love the idea at its heart. You're a Stitcher, or a guy with a length of hemp that can be used to bind the sundered parts of an apocalyptic world together. Hemp can be acquired from the environment, but you can only carry so much—oh and it's only so effective, at least at the start. To stitch the severed islands back together, you first have to jump to move the Earth, then hit F or K to hurriedly sew the landmasses shut. I admire the mind that came up with that detail—this is a silly and sweet take on the end of the world.

Kram Keep by Knighty

Would you look at that! I'm a sucker for games that fit entire worlds onto one screen, and Kram Keep earns my deepest respect by being a perfectly readable game too. Somehow, you can find your character and tell everything that's going in this micro Metroidvania, and that's no small feat indeed. Even if it weren't all zoomed out like, this would be a pretty good platformer, with solid physics and art and a decent level of challenge for those brave enough to dive in.

Planeter by Ditto

Planetoids + gravity = oooooohhhhhh, that's lovely. And this is an equation that applies to Ditto's Planeter as well. It's a sort of puzzler in which you expand a solar system by ferrying things into switchy things, but it's actually a game about jumping between gravity wells, listening to catchy music, and making friends with the colourful aliens scampering around and around their spherical homes. Ditto's great at making games that feel weighty and solid, and that's true as ever here.

Johnston by Jake Clover

Jake Clover's atmospheric space game Space Pirate Dernshous gets a successor in the form of Johnston, a game of giant, giant text boxes and stories rather than fuel conversation and blowing stuff up. Wander into wormholes, suns, stations and other phenomena in the little craft that could, while you curse Jake Clover for not adding more line breaks or, at the very least, a slightly bigger font.

Frog Assassin by Auntie Pixelante

You're a frog that assassinates flies—so, in other words, you're a frog. Unlike in the real world, you can't just sit on a lilypad and wait for the insects to come to you; you're instead locked into a tiny rhythm-based pixel world. (Also the flies here will kill you, if you're not careful.) As Auntie Pixelante explains here, your enemies in this world jive to a regular beat. See how many you can take out, by bashing into them before they bash into you; it's a simple but tough matter of timing.